Today is Labor Day in the United States, and as with other public holidays, I am going to take the opportunity to talk about some behind the scenes and personal activities.

September is a very busy month for me personally, with a short film project in progress and a two week vacation in Europe at the end of the month.

I intend to keep up the basic updates while I am travelling, but there will probably be less here in the News Log during that time.

On the website side of things I am working on two new features for the database.

Firstly I am enabling international entries, which will allow the same kind of details that we have for the US database to be stored for titles of interest from other countries.

Secondly I am aiming to enable extensions for titles with more than one disc or one movie included, to allow for complete information for box sets.

These features are in progress and will eventually go live on the site.

Hope all you US residents had a great three day weekend!

I see a few interesting new listings for the UK.

Watch for Ghostbusters from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on June 15th, 2009.

Van Helsing has been listed by Universal Pictures UK, scheduled for April 7th.

Also watch for Revolutionary Road from Paramount Home Entertainment on June 29th.

South Pacific has a different distributor in the UK - watch for this from 2 Entertain Video on June 15th.

Just a personal aside - I am sure that some have noticed a posting slow down this week.

Those who follow me on Twitter will be aware that my previous day job evaporated and I have been seeking new employment, since sadly the website far from covers the cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The good news is that I secured a new job today with a nice increase to boot - however I expect this will mess with my routine somewhat.

So the erratic posting may continue until I am settled in my new schedule.

I am also working on a new version of the site code and am considering making this public early for the keen folks amongst you to beta test.

If there is enough interest in comments, I will put a pointer to the new site version on the forum and open a discussion there.

Have a great weekend!

Folks, sorry for the outages today that were due to DNS issues at my ISP.

Things should be working just fine now and will hopefully continue to do so.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: No sooner were the DNS issues solved, apparently the main router blocked all the traffic causing outage for most of Sunday and Monday.

I will be poking around to see if everything is intact - so far it looks ok.

Certainly the next big thing on my list is a ‘plan b’ for when this sort of thing happens again..!

Blu-ray Stats is now a Twitter-er. I joined up with the handle BlurayStats in anticipation of the upcoming 2009 CES show.

I will be there along with my Format War Central cohort Tyler and you can be sure that a lot of the very latest information will be going out over Twitter this year.

I will also likely have a contest drawing after CES, taken at random from my Twitter followers at the time, though I haven’t decided what the prize pool will be yet - it will likely include some CES 2009 goodies, as well as some other prizes that I will specify up front as it were.

For now there will probably not be much action (most messages would involve ‘fixing MySQL issues’) but be sure that things will get get more interesting as CES gets closer.

Click here to follow BlurayStats.

Apparently my ISP lost the database!

Luckily I had a back up and I have pushed it into a temporary location until the ISP finds the real one.

Some pages may not work quite right but I think I have modified most of them to point at the new database.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Feel free to comment if you find a page that does not work.

During a PM discussion on the forum, I have added a new feature to the Collection page of the My Blu-ray Stats features.

Now the first thing you see in the summary is the total retail value of the US titles in your collection.

This number could be considered a bragging right, or perhaps is a sign that you should update your contents insurance or even slow down on the movie buying.

You should almost certainly not show the wife!

I will admit that I was a little shocked to see my Total Retail Value of $10793.13.

I got a lot of the discs on significant discount! Honest!

In any case, take a look at what your Blu-ray retail is worth, and if you don’t have your collection entered yet, get a login at the forum and add some discs to your collection!

And remember it never hurts to ask for new features.

In the typical spirit of adding features that I personally find useful, I have added a page that concisely lists the new releases for the week.

This is a no frills list of titles and studios - the titles link to the details page in the stats database if you want to see more on any given title.

With any luck, this page will automagically remain current, updating between Saturday and Sunday each week, depending on your time zone.

A link to the page will always be visibly in the sidebar to the right, which saves all the tedious searching through blog posts to find such things…

Enjoy!

I was thinking the other day, that it would be nice to be able to track the Amazon prices of the Blu-ray players I was interested in buying.

Rather than having to go to each page and see what the current pricing for each is (since they like to hide that useful info!), wouldn’t it be great to have it just laid out for you.

And so, I added the current pricing information to the Blu-ray Stats home page!

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It is my pleasure to announce the winner of our first Contest held here at Blu-ray Stats.

Scott S was chosen by random.org to be the new owner of Disney’s WALL·E 3 Disc Edition.

Thanks to everyone who entered and contributed - I have some new ideas based on the responses.

There will be a post later in the week to discuss the feedback.

Today’s new releases crossed a milestone today when the number of titles in the Blu-ray Statistics database exceeded 1000 releases.

The ‘1k’ is something I have been expecting this month, while other stories foretold 1000 titles, counting both available and announced titles at the end of last month.

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